If only look were everything...

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2003)

*Some minor spoilers involved*

As a fan of good horror, I suppose I should be glad someone actually tried to achieve a truly disturbing atmosphere outside of the typical 'make-them-jump' fest that permeates most of the poor efforts that make it into theaters. This was an ambitious attempt, but in the end it felt like the sometimes capable Danny Boyle and his crew put too much into the look and too little into the story.
There are a lot of aspects of this movie worthy of credit. The digital stuff really set off the opening shots in the empty London streets as well as the distant fires of Manchester. The rapid-fire, jerky movements of the infected - at least in the few instances they stuck to this sort of movement (in most of the encounters, the infected just broke into normal runs) - did seem to give the plot some seperation from the Romero zombie films it borrowed liberally from. However, at times...this approach became almost indulgent, going through multi-cut off angle scenes where it really enhanced nothing. (An awkward over the shoulder in an early dialogue scene comes to mind) The intent seemed to want to disorient, but more truly just distracted. My biggest problem was with the plot. The early half of the movie focused on the brutality of this new world, and the unmerciful role basic survival had placed on the group...however, when encountering the soldiers, this was scrapped for the standard chivalrous moral crusade which ended in chaos and could have very well taken the very lives our 'hero' was striving to save. The ending was also extremely disappointing...taking the easy way out of what might have actually been an interesting bit of the story, as the group was now once again free of protection and surrounded by terrain that a character had referred to earlier in the film as "teeming with infected".

One of the attractive points of the most classic horror is its greater distance from the formulas of popular cinema. This movie tries very hard to create the impression that this is true in its case as well, however it's all look and little substance. In the end, the entire effort is only slightly less than typical.